Of Ants and Men: Competition, Mutual Aid, and Evolution in Wells’s Scientific Romances

Author: Brenda Galicia

Field of Study: Biochemistry

Program Affiliation: Source Project Research Program

Faculty Mentors: Will Glovinsky

Easel: 41

Timeslot: Afternoon

Abstract: In the late nineteenth century, evolutionary theory reshaped scientific, social, and political understandings of human progress. Yet the precise mechanisms of evolution itself were hardly settled. In the 1890s, Thomas Huxley and Pyotr Kropotkin debated whether evolutionary fitness was determined mainly through individual competition or social cooperation (as demonstrated in the elaborate societies of ants). The biological controversy had clear ramifications for discussions about the supposed naturalness of social hierarchy and the desirability of biological “improvement” through eugenics. This paper examines how these conflicts regarding evolution, class struggle, and hierarchy were reflected and critiqued in two works by H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Reading these scientific romances alongside writings by Huxley and Kropotkin, this project argues that Wells exposes the ethical instability of translating biological hierarchy into social policy, revealing science fiction as a critical site for debating evolution and eugenics.